My mother is Costa Rican from Puerto Limon (via Jamaica) and my
father is from Panama (via Jamaica). Though I was born in New York, my
relationship with Costa Rica has been life-long. For this reason, I
write about the life and legacy of my great-grandmother, Ruth Grant
Young de Gourzong, a Jamaican immigrant and the family matriarch who
established firm roots in Puerto Limon at the turn of the 20th century.
I highlight Ruth because she is seemingly an anomaly in the paradigm of
racial and gender segregation which was par for the course in Puerto
Limon during her lifetime. She is an important lens into appreciating
the complexity of this community as her story offers an insider view on
narratives of agency, perseverance, courage and negotiation that framed
many of the life choices of people in Limon, yet theirs are stories
rarely heard. The first part of this work frames the Costa Rica which
20th century immigrant West Indians encountered, including my family. It
is unlikely that they perceived or estimated what they were coming to
when they looked across the seas for work and better economic lives. In
the second part of this work, I am most interested in thinking about my
great grandmother, Ruth, by observing the strategies she used to
actualize her dreams and strivings for her family living in Puerto Limon
and abroad. Hers was not a nostalgic narrative of looking back, in fact
she hardly, if ever, spoke about her family in Jamaica; rather, hers is
a story of moving forward and generating resources to ensure a path for
generations to come. To this day, my family's motto is that
everything we do now should be in consideration for six generations in
the future.

My research in Costa Rica has shown evidence of two separate
histories from people of African descent on this land; yet, they are not
in historical or contemporary conversation with each other. The Costa
Rica which 20th century immigrant West Indians encountered already had a
troubled relationship with Blackness. Obscured in their history was an
African presence which had already been in Costa Rica for over three
hundred years. The national mythology downplayed the presence of slavery
in Costa Rica by insisting that the few Africans and Indigenous people
who were present in colonial times eventually mixed into the general
Hispanic population. Thereby, evidence of an African socio-cultural and
economic legacy was swallowed in a quest for Spanish exceptionalism
reinforced through national narratives of whiteness. In many ways, the
act of rendering invisible an African-descended population in Costa Rica
from colonial times gave way to a mindset which promoted a non-ethnic,
mono-cultural sensibility that would play itself out at the formation of
the nation and specifically in its dealings with the people we now know
as Afro-Costa Ricans. For 21st century Afro-Costa Ricans and their
generations to understand and claim a larger and longer birthright to
this country is critical in rupturing many staid ideas about Costa
Rica's "pure" Spanish lineage.

My family, among many others, came from immigrant Jamaican blacks
who arrived on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica (specifically Puerto
Limon) at the turn of the twentieth century to help build the Northern
Railway and work on the banana plantations for the American-owned United
Fruit Company (UFC). Their lives, and thus their stories, have been
muted by law and history:

The national government of Costa Rica considered the largely black
workforce on the [Caribbean] coast as "foreign" and temporary
labor. By 1935, the majority of people of African descent born in
Costa Rica were stateless. The Blacks in Limon, prior to the Civil
War of 1948 were not fully integrated into the ... country. (2)

I come from three generations of these women and men who survived
as employees of the UFC. What they helped foster, with their Limonese
creole," English and hard turned tongues forcing Spanish, was a
complex, diverse community that was mostly British Jamaican (3) and
authentically Caribbean in a Spanish Costa Rica which had in place
unspoken demarcations that limited Black movement into the
"white" highlands. When they arrived in Limon, they faced a
nation where by 1921, the Secretary General for La Sociedad Econimica de
Amigos del Pais, M.A Zumbabdo stated, "West Indians were prone to
crime and their presence in the country threated to mongrelize the white
race ... Therefore, the Costa Rican government must stop all further
immigration of people of African descent and sterilize all those already
in the country." (4)

Imagine the irony of this statement when the vast majority of
Hispanic Costa Ricans had been venerating for over two hundred years a
Black Madonna, lovingly called "La Negrita (5)," who by 1824
was the patron saint of the country! The icon of La Negrita is a
20-centimeter, dark colored statue of a mother and child that has been
attributed to the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. According to Costa Rican
national folklore, the icon appeared to a woman of African descent on
the outskirts of Cartago, the colonial capital around 1635:

In the area that is today, "Los Pardos: there lived a simple woman.
Upon a rock, near a spring, this humble mulata encountered the
extraordinary image. In her home, she put it in a box and returned
to collecting sticks. A second time, the same amazing sculpture
appeared upon the rock. This repetition did not concern her: she
took the image thinking that there were two of the same. But the
holy Queen was having fun with this simple soul because the woman
came near the rock again she encountered the same apparition for
the third time. Afraid and unsure, she went to the box and did not
find the other images except for the one she was carrying. She ran
to the priest and explained her case. After hearing the story, the
priest put the image in a chest. But the image disappeared from
there as well, and for a fourth time she was found in a field upon
the same rock by the priest and the same woman. From there was she
was returned and placed in the Tabernacle. [The next day], she was
not there. Resolved, the parish priest and congregation went to the
rock, where they found her once again ... A thatched roof was built
over the rock where her Sanctuary was constructed. (6)

Ken Lohse's Master's thesis on La Negrita, Slaves of the
Virgin, documents with clarity the narrative of how the icon takes on
both cultural and aesthetic value in Costa Rica. Through a 189year
process, the La Negrita has been "whitened," thereby removing
her from any relationship with Africa. Russel Sharman comments on the
respective timeline of the icon, which spans from, "La
Negrita's appearance to a mulata girl in the 1630s, to her
appropriation by white elites in Cartago in 1782, her adoption as
national patroness in 1824, and her contemporary adoration [as La Virgen
de Los Angeles] and disassociation with colonial slavery." (7)

Colonial Cartago, Costa Rica

It is stated that there were Africans who accompanied Christopher
Columbus on his journey to the Caribbean coast in 1502. With the
establishment of the colonial capital in Cartago, slavery was firmly in
place by 1563. In relation to other slave systems in the New World,
Costa Rica's version was unique because it did not maintain a
mono-crop or plantation economy. With the estimated 10, 0000 people of
African descent in colonial Costa Rica during its 260 year existence,
slavery could be defined as more of an intimate, domestic servitude,
where at times the lines blurred between the status of freedom and
enslavement. Most people of African descent worked in three distinct
areas: on the cacao plantations in Matina on the Caribbean coast, which
saw its peak between 1690 and 1740, the cattle ranches of Nicoya on the
Pacific, and as domestic servants in Cartago. By the 17th century, free
Blacks served as part of the militia in protecting the country's
coastal borders.

Cartago in the 17th century had an African population of about 20%
(both free and enslaved). As a way for the Catholic Church to maintain a
hold on this population, its labor and probable miscegenation, they
designated a settlement outside of the capital called La Puebla de los
Pardos (8), for free people of African descent. The Catholic Church
established numerous "Cruz de Caravacas (9)" to demarcate the
lines between "black" and "white" life in colonial
Costa Rica. These crosses made clear the limits of where black lives
could exist. Similar forms of geographic segregation were replicated
across the country in the 20th century when "Hispanic" Costa
Ricans engaged with Blackness once again.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 1826, Miguel Bonila, a colonial Cartago priest, documented the
"official" narrative of the apparition of the icon where he
fixes the date as 1635. However, the veneration of La Negrita was
limited to a handful of local Black residents, when the Bishop, on
August 2, 1650, established La Cofradia, "The Brotherhood," a
Black lay organization charged with maintaining and promoting the
worship of La Negrita. The Catholic Church felt "devotion to the
Virgen de los Angeles something only blacks could be interested
in." (10) For over 200 years devotion to La Negrita was reserved
for people of African descent. Once the Church made her into the
nation's patron saint, the production of meaning outside of African
spirituality became a method to subdue and control African descended
populations.

I argue that the Costa Rican Catholic Church understood the power
of African spirituality and thus appropriated this icon of "La
Negrita" into a symbol of Costa Rican nationalism. By the end of
slavery in 1824, the Catholic Church began to promote the cult of the
Virgin de Los Angeles (La Negrita) and nationalism as one. All official
narratives that associated La Negrita with a slave past or African
religious sensibility were eradicated in an attempt to move the
"white" nation forward as an independent country. The icon of
La Negrita, "is [now] fully disassociated with questions of race
and remade in the image of the rural working class." (11) Housed in
the magnificent Basilica of Cartago and honored by an annual pilgrimage
where millions of devout Costa Ricans crawl the final steps to the
Church in prayer, La Negrita is associated with her ability to heal, not
with African origins.

Negated were the richer meanings attributed to ancient African
spirituality clearly understood, acknowledged and maintained by the
Africans brought to Costa Rica during slavery. Very telling is the fact
that in 1739, the Africans worshipping La Negrita were accused of,
"so-called pagan traditions that arose around her feast day."
(12) It was at the presence of these African rituals that the Catholic
Church began a dedicated appropriation of La Negrita, taking her out of
African hands and into a "white" national narrative that
remains firmly in place in the 21st century. Attempts by the nation to
"quell/subdue" African spiritual practices and their overt
presence continued to occur with the emergence of a new Afro-descendant
population of workers who arrived 48 years after the ending of slavery
to work for the Northern Railway Company.

I ask myself what would life have been like for my West Indian
ancestors if they had known and understood that they were following the
migratory patterns of Africans who landed along the same coastal area in
1502 with Christopher Columbus? According to Trevor Purcell, "most
slaves in Central America were purchased from the English in Jamaica,
suggesting the probability of a strong West Indian link among the
earliest Blacks in the region." (13) With this knowledge, would
these 20th century immigrants have exhibited more caution or firmer ties
to their homeland in Jamaica? Would they like my maternal grandfather,
decide not to "naturalize" into a Costa Rican, refusing to
give up his Jamaican identity, though his four daughters and wife became
citizens? (14) With knowledge of the lives of Africans, both enslaved
and free, in colonial Costa Rica, would these West Indians have been
better prepared for the historically sanctioned legalized hostility that
faced them in the forms of debt peonage, abusive labor relations, living
segregation, ID carnets and cedulas which, like the Apartheid system of
the South, needed to constantly list, contain, number and hold
accountable the "potential" of Blackness through policing and
divide and conquer?

With its independence from Spain in 1848, the Republic of Costa
Rica understood that in order to grow economically, travel between the
central highlands and the ports of the Caribbean coast was crucial.
After several failed attempts to build a railroad internally, in the
early 1870s, Henry Meiggs, an American and the pre-eminent railway
builder of the time, was contracted to build the railway. Construction
began in 1871 and was completed in 1890. Meiggs's nephew, Minor
Cooper Keith from Brooklyn, New York took over the railway construction
by 1874. At the same time, he began to grow bananas, taking full
advantage of the railway lines that had been completed on the Atlantic
lowlands. Keith eventually negotiated a deal for the completion of the
railway with the Costa Rican government called the
"Soto-Keith" contract which granted him a 99 year lease to
800,000 acres of land, exemption from taxation and ownership of the
railway when he completed it. Within a decade, Keith's company
emerged as one of the most important producers of bananas in the world.
By the time the railway was complete over one million stems of bananas
were exported, primarily to the USA. In 1899, the United Fruit Company
was formed. An estimated 43,000 Jamaicans came to Costa Rica to work on
the railway and banana plantations between 1891 and 1911. (15)

My great-Uncle Charlie Gourzong worked for more than 43 years in a
number of capacities in the Limon office of the Northern Railway Company
including as General Cashier. My grandfather, Stephen Robotham, worked
for the United Fruit Company as the Foremen for the Dock workers until
1944 when he oversaw the workers' payroll in the Northern's
Main office. These immigrants, seldom reflected in the visual art and
photography of the time, were the central labor force who generated
incredible commercial and economic wealth for both the Americans of the
UFC and Hispanic Costa Ricans in the banana trade with the world. Their
stories testify to complex migrations, community tensions, multiple
identities, African based spiritual rituals and personal pride that
bridged both a Caribbean sensibility with a Costa Rican nationalism:

The failure to recognize the contribution of people of African
descent in the development of modern Costa Rica highlights the
problem posed by the current [national] historiography.
[Historians] failed to challenge the underlying assumptions about
Costa Rica nationalism. The real Costa Rica is much larger and more
diverse than is evident. (16)

The community which began to form in Limon comprised of Caribbean
workers mostly under "debt peonage" where their wages were
paid in weekly vouchers redeemable in the Northern's Commissary,
thereby tying workers to the job. This community was class conscious,
highly literate, skilled, and cosmopolitan because of exposure to the
world through the ports. This enclave understood themselves as former
British subjects, they spoke English, were Anglican and Baptist and
many, "perceived the Hispanic culture and lifestyle as inferior to
their own and thus minimized their association with Costa Ricans."
(17) Stuck between the ever- tenuous relationship with the American UFC
and Hispanic Costa Ricans who were openly hostile to the presence of
people of African-descent, these immigrants had to negotiate every
aspect of their lives in Limon. The complexity of emerging into an
Afro-Costa Rican from a West Indian cultural heritage was a painful
transition in a country which legally attempted to violate their human
rights in multiple instances. The Calderon government of 1942 passed a
decree prohibiting the immigration of the "black race, Chinese,
Arabs, Turks, Syrians, Armenians, Gypsies and Coolies." (18)
Seemingly, Costa Rican Hispanics built their concept of whiteness on the
general "othering" of global ethnics of color, especially
those perceived to be on the margins of society. The immigration
prohibitions went in line with the similar sentiments of the region
which reeked of post-World War II national alignments of defining new
borders. In the shuffle for alliances in the region, Costa Rica wanted
to remain in the favor of the United States as it emerged as a super
power during this time period. There were several countries in the
Hispanic "world" who maintained the language of a Spanish
(read: white) purity including Trujillo's Dominican Republic.
Therefore, Costa Rica's immigration policies were clearly meditated
and a part of a larger regional conversation on segregation and power.
In the end, the largest tangible recipient of these exclusionary
politics were people of African descent. Therefore, the children (like
my mother) of West Indian immigrants were limited because they did not
acquire the nationality of their parents at birth and were stateless,
though born in Costa Rica, until they became "naturalized."

Running the Northern Quarters: Limon, Costa Rica

My great-grand parents, Ruth and William Gourzong, came to Costa
Rica to work for the Northern Railway Company at the turn of the 20th
century. Ruth, a black woman, was born in Jamaica. William, a black man,
came from New Orleans. He was hired to run the Northern
"Quarters" (aka the Northern Hotel as christened by my
family), by the company in the US and he went to Jamaica on the way to
Limon, where he met and married Ruth. Together, they had seven children:
Charlie, Winifred, Beatrice, Leonora (my grandma), William, Olivia and
Victor--all born in Limon, Costa Rica.

When I hear stories of my family in Limon of the 1930s, I think to
17th century colonial Cartago. At first, in 1629 the Catholic Church
forced free people of African descent to live in La Gotera, the
outskirts of colonial Cartago. However, by 1650 Puebla de los Pardos was
established formally for this population. Fast forward two hundred years
and one finds similar living demarcations paralleled in Limon between
the famous "black" Jamaica-town where my family lived and the
"white zone" reserved for white Americans of the UFC and
Hispanic Costa Ricans.

Harpelle notes, "The biggest employer of women in Limon was
the United Fruit Company. Women were hired in large numbers to work as
maids, cooks, nannies and general servants." (19) My great
grandparents were the sole proprietors of the Northern Quarters, an
exclusive temporary residence for the railway workers. The Quarters was
a dormitory for the higher level railway workers who remained in Limon
overnight on their way back to San Jose. Each room had a twin-sized bed
and was cleaned exclusively by a Caribbean woman named Ms. Dora. Meals
were provided three times a day. There were communal bathrooms and
showers. Each of the men paid for their stay with signed vouchers and
the amount was deducted from their salaries at the end of the week. My
great-aunt Beatrice managed the kitchens through the '50s and early
'60s until the Quarters closed its doors in 1963. Mrs. Moltan was
the famed cook. Her daily soups and sliced cow tongue were praised
amongst the workers. The young women in my family were not allowed to go
beyond the three private family rooms allotted to my great-grandparents.
My great grandmother, Ruth, had the rare honor of having one of the only
telephones in Limon and it was her responsibility to prepare special
rooms if foreign guests were expected once she got the "call"
from San Jose. An exclusive dining room was made available for foreign
male guests, including the American bosses of the Northern Railway.

Though the Quarters were segregated and served only Hispanic Costa
Ricans and foreigners who worked for the company, at William's
death in 1937, his wife, Ruth ran the hotel for more than 20 years as a
widow who spoke only English. My mother (20) Norma Olivia, born to a
first generation Limonese mother and a Jamaican father, has fond
memories of her grandmother, who she lived with from kindergarten to
second grades. Through her job as the hotel manager, Ruth was able to
build a big house on the outskirts of Jamaica- town. Because of her
veritable wealth, Ruth was able to financially assist her seven children
and their families as well as play a central financial role in the
upkeep of the Baptist Church, of which she was a Deacon and head of the
Women's Group. She owned several properties which she allowed her
children and their families to live in, had wonderful house parties with
a piano and gramophone and she had one of the first houses to have
indoor plumbing with a huge bathtub and toilet. Not trusting the state
of the banks in Limon, which had already been bankrupt a number of times
during the 1930s, Ruth kept vast quantities of money (dollars and
colones) hidden throughout her house. In old age, she hired a Black
lawyer from Limon to write her will in which she allotted properties,
goods and money to her family. She ensured that my mother went all the
way through graduate school in Costa Rica. One of Ruth's favorite
pastimes beyond her responsibilities at the Northern and the Baptist
Church was to travel--both locally and to the United States. She had the
means as an independent, financially secure Black woman to stay at
hotels in San Jose "just because." My mother, the favorite
grandchild, often accompanied her on "overnight" excursions to
San Jose. It is not often that these types of narratives about
successful West Indian women in Limon are documented (21) as, according
to my mother, there were many other successful Black women and men who
served as role models and formed a tight network in order to advance
their Costa Rican-born children into society. More often than not, this
time period is framed around the tumultuous relationships between West
Indian labor union, the Costa Rican government and the United Fruit
Company.

My mother remembers that though her grandmother had no formal
education beyond elementary school, she had a wealth of commonsense and
was highly respected amongst the Caribbean community in Limon. When Ruth
walked the one and a half blocks from her house in Jamaica-town (22) to
the Northern Quarters every day, Black men would stop and tip their hats
at her. My mother would receive her monthly stipend from her grandmother
when she went to college in San Jose (funded by her grandmother), tucked
into a chicken-scratched letter of endearment and support. The irony of
the barely formed letters on the page confirmed the sacrifice of one
matriarch for her family, which today, boasts numerous doctors, lawyers,
civil engineers, architects, professors, dentists, linguists and social
workers.

Life was not easy in Jamaica-town of the 1930s; however, Ruth (and
her children who spoke enough Spanish to help her manage the Quarters as
she grew older), understood that in order to survive she had to forge a
community within Limon that called on the creative strengths of the
Caribbean. My mother remembers having one pair of shoes for the entire
school year which was put into the wooden stove in order to dry so that
she could attend English school in the evenings after
government-mandated Spanish schools in the morning. Those memories are
juxtaposed sharply against a time when she was taken out of her
parents' house and went to live with her grandmother, away from the
shared bedrooms with her three other sisters. There were no more
borrowed dresses, hand-me-downs or wet shoes for three years as she
moved into a life of ease. My mother experienced a house with
indoor-plumbing and a piano. She was also old enough to witness the
methodical way that "Granny" saved and planned for her family;
moving her children strategically to different properties that she
owned, making investments and simply providing an ear and (financial
support) for her neighbors who had less than she did. As a child, my
mother lamented the same trait in her own mother as they struggled to
make ends meet with four mouths to feed and eventually adding her two
younger cousins after their mother died. Her mother, Leonora, would give
away their Sunday dinner if there was a hungry family in the
neighborhood who came softly knocking at "Mrs. Lee's"
door because they knew she would never turn them away. These moments of
kindness are telling because my mother hated the trips to the store
where food was bought on credit when her father's paycheck did not
stretch until the end of the week. It was in those discrete corners that
"Granny Ruth" would miraculously provide the little extra to
make the ends meet. These actions were also manifested in the Baptist
Church, where Ruth provided funds in order to for the Church to be
sustained. When my mother was sent up to a family friend in San Jose (an
important Limon family who moved to the central highlands for work--one
of the few black families established there) by her grandmother to
attend high school then Teacher's College (in Spanish), Ruth paid
for her room and board with the Curling family. (23) The Curlings,
Afro-Costa Rican political activists, were changing the tide of legal
rights for Limon-born West Indians and my mother and her sisters
received the benefits of living amongst this family as they were helped
to apply for "naturalization" after 1948 in order to become
Costa Rican citizens. Ruth understood maintaining close knit networks
both in Limon and in San Jose. She was politically astute and encouraged
her grandchildren to be part of the changing national tide so that they
could reap the benefits of their full civic and human rights.

Drawing Conclusions: The Way Forward

In many ways, the patterns of my family, re-affirm the general
cultural patterns of West Indian immigrants who migrated to Limon at the
turn of the 20th century. They had little association with Hispanic
Costa Ricans, they were politically-minded and by 1920, Marcus
Garvey's UNIA had established 23 branches in Limon, though many
conservative and wary Jamaicans (including my family) stayed clear of
UNIA activity. (24) My mother's generation (now in their late 70s),
was the first to sit at the crossroads of statelessness as most did not
hold a nostalgia for returning to a homeland in the Caribbean.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By using Ruth's life story in Limon as the sole proprietor of
the Northern Quarters, a space where she had to single-handedly interact
and negotiate with American bosses and Hispanic elites who worked on the
railway, I have shown how she was able to successfully carve a unique
space for herself in Limon during the mid-20th century. Ruth's
multiple positions as mother, widow, laborer, Church elder, grandmother,
property owner and shrewd businesswoman is a reaffirmation of the
complex challenges and successes of Afro-Costa Ricans as they engaged
the world around them--as postcolonial secondary migrations forced them
to tumble and tangle with decisions about entering into mainstream
Hispanic Costa Rica. Contrary to many notions of desired assimilation
from this West Indian group vying to move ahead into Costa Rican
"white society," I suggest that Ruth forged her identity on
her own terms, rather than those of the nation state. I place her firmly
in the historical trajectory of 16th century Africans in colonial
Cartago who labored in the building of the country and did not readily
acquiesce to the colonial terms of personhood. For me, this is a legacy
of African descended populations in Costa Rica; and I believe that the
nation will be richer as each life story is layered into its history.

My decision to leave my life in New York and relocate to Costa Rica
with my husband and two children was, in many ways, a spiritual act of
direct intervention. I felt that my writing could facilitate a
discussion I know needed to happen, first within my own Afro-descended
family and then in the larger Costa Rican community. When the United
Nations declared 2015-2024 the Decade of the Afro-Descendant and the
current President, Guillermo Solis, established the Ministry of
Afro-Costa Rican Affairs with Quince Duncan as its Commissioner, I
understood that I was entering Costa Rica at a "moment." The
contemporary trends in the region where Afro-descendent populations are
attaining visibility and voice is also affecting the kinds of
conversations that Costa Ricans need to have about race and racism. Of
course, there are have been increased moments of tension, including the
debacle after the National Symphony Orchestra (25)'s decision in
2015 to create a musical performance based on the Costa Rican classic
children's book, Cocori; a simplistic Sambo-like narrative of a
little Black boy from the Caribbean coast who has adventures with
animals and is saved by the graces of a young blond girl. There has been
a long political fight by the Afro-Costa Rican community to remove this
mandatory text from the public education school system. What stood out
for me in this debate was the "blindness" of many Hispanic
Costa Ricans who could not "see"/"perceive" that not
only was Cocori a caricature of Blackness but that the Afro-Costa Rican
voice was valuable in their assessment of the discriminatory nature of
the book.

Questions around censorship, hyper-sensitivity of Afro-descended
people and racism emerged in public media and there were even death
threats against some of the Afro-Costa Rican political leaders who were
most vocal against the book. In August 2015, the United Nations asked
Costa Rica to remove the book from its national curriculum as it was
clearly racist. The year before (August 2014), Costa Rican's
constitution was changed to recognized the country as "multiethnic
and pluricultural." I feel as if there is momentum in conversations
on race, power, voice and visibility that is part of a raised
consciousness which was initiated by the Black Lives Matter Movement in
the United States. What I have noticed from writing a monthly column on
race and diversity in the Tico Times called "Musings from an
Afro-Costa Rican" is that the desire is there for this conversation
to be out in the open. I have received hundreds of emails from readers,
many of them Afro-Costa Rican in various parts of the globe, who have
affirmed my decision to challenge the many stereotypes about Puerto
Limon by putting in place narratives of real people who had lives of
success. I write about real Afro-Costa Rican families who have
established legacies and who continue to contribute to the well-being of
Costa Rica. The simple fact is that many people have not had accurate
historical information about their country. Across the board, all the
Costa Ricans I have engaged with are willing to learn new information,
and this what creates hope for me. Much of the history of Puerto Limon
has died within the community and its diaspora. It is part of my person
journey to foster these conversations between time and place in Costa
Rica in order for a fuller, layered historical account to be created. My
jobs is to call the names of those who came before me.

(1) Writer, Independent Scholar and founder of the Tengo Sed
Writers' Retreats in Costa Rica, Dr. Gordon-Chipembere lives in
Costa Rica with her husband and two children. She can be contacted at
indisunflower@gmail.com.

(3) Note that though Jamaicans made up the large majority of
immigrants to Puerto Limon at the turn of the 20th century, many other
Caribbean islands were represented including but not exclusive to,
Barbados and St. Thomas,

(8) Pardo was the generic name used by Spaniards to demarcate free
Blacks. Puebla de los Pardos was a township for free black, mulatos and
indigenous people on the outskirts of the colonial capital.

(9) The only remaining Cruz de Caravaca, which the colonial
Catholic Church used to demarcate "black" and
"white" living areas, is now a National Memorial Site as of
September 14, 2014. It is in the area former known Puebla de Los Pardos
in Cartago.

(14) Citizenship at that time meant access to education and my
grandmother was very clear that her daughters were to be educated in San
Jose; reaping the benefits of what Costa Rica had given to its Hispanic
citizens for years. My grandfather, seventeen years older than my
grandmother maintained a political allegiance to Jamaica. Though he
learned to read Spanish, he never spoke it and when he died 45 years
ago, he was given a burial plot in the "Cemetery of
Foreigners" in San Jose which was owned by Americans at the time.

(23) Don Alex Curling was one of the first leading Afro-Costa
Ricans in the 1940s who, as a lawyer, affected national policy on how
the Costa Rican government would eventually treat Afro-Costa Ricans
within the country; "for years, Curling urged Costa Rican-born West
Indians to exercise their right to citizenship in order to build a more
secure future for themselves" (Ibid., 175). His daughter, Thelma
Curling was the lawyer who helped "naturalize" my grandmother,
my mother and her three sisters.

(24) The radicalism of Garvey was seen as too extreme to many in my
family, who were just beginning to enjoy the benefits of full
citizenship. Taught not to "rock the boat," my mother and her
siblings were expected to be moral, upstanding, Costa Rican citizens who
respected their elders, participated fully in the Church community with
the ultimate goals of marriage, motherhood and education. As women of
color from that that time period, political agency and activism was not
as encouraged as community work and Church participation.

(25) See Robert Isenberg's article, "'Cocori,'
a racism debate, and a brief history of controversial children's
lit" for some perspective (Tico Times, May 6, 2015).

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